Tag: 2008 Crisis

Irish leaders—eager to maintain that compliance with the demands of international creditors after the 2008 crisis was the best choice for Ireland—are concerned that the defiant tactics of Greece’s newly elected Syriza party may expose their program as flawed if Syriza wins concessions from the troika of lenders.

“Hundreds of pages of transcripts, based on recordings made at the time, reveal the ignorance of Fed officials about economic conditions during the climactic months of the financial crisis,” The New York Times reports.

An Associated Press article in February confirmed a purchase order by the Department of Homeland Security for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. That’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over twenty years. Someone in government seems to expect some serious civil unrest. Why?

There is a strong connection between scarce resources and cognition: The more a person struggles financially, the less he or she can channel brain processes to completing other tasks. When you can’t make ends meet, the weight of worry occupies a large portion of the mind.

Tape recordings from inside the once-“doomed” Anglo Irish Bank reveal for the first time how the institution’s top executives lied to the government about the extent of their losses at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 in a scandal that drove the nation into austerity, Paul Williams reports at The Irish Independent.

In a development that may please Truthdigger of the Week Sheila Bair, Vikram Pandit, the man who was in charge of megabank Citigroup during the financial crisis, left his job abruptly and with little explanation on Tuesday.

Few voices in the regulatory community called for the expulsion of derelict executives and the means to force banks to lend bailout money to the public amid the 2008 financial crisis. Former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair was among them.

Rather than fight its way through court, Bank of America has dipped into its “litigation reserves” to settle a shareholder lawsuit over the dubious methods it used to acquire Merrill Lynch as the credit crisis ramped up.

At the height of the financial crisis, The Guardian identified 25 bankers, economists, politicians and financial officials who helped bring about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. What are they up to now?

Growth for the world’s largest exporter hit its slowest pace in three years as demand for Chinese products waned in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, prompting the country’s leaders to encourage investment with stimulus measures.

On Monday, economist Simon Johnson presented officials at the Federal Reserve with a petition containing 38,000 signatures appealing for the removal of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

Amid a festering economic crisis, Greek society’s super-rich have retreated to their private mansions and island resorts to sip cocktails, kick back on imported Asian sand and figure out new ways to slip their money out of the country.

The American banking industry enjoyed profits of $35.3 billion in the first quarter of 2012, the industry’s best performance since 2007, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. But it did so largely because banks put aside less money to cover bad loans, while keeping a lid on new lending.

In the wake of the 2008 crash and the widespread government-imposed austerity that followed, high levels of long-term and youth unemployment across the globe are in danger of becoming fixed, according to an annual report by the International Labor Organization.

There are more than five times as many vacant homes in the U.S. as there are homeless people, according to Amnesty International USA. Since 2007, banks have shuttered about 8 million American houses, almost doubling the previous number, while 3.5 million homeless shiver in the cold.

In his first essay for New York Magazine since quitting The New York Times last spring, Frank Rich thoughtfully details Barack Obama’s failure to push back against the financial wheeler-dealers who drove the country to the brink of ruin ... (more)